We have been working on a couple of projects that use dynamic image maps. We had an issue that crashed IE6 and IE7 when a certain combination of links were clicked on. The scenario is that a user is presented with a map of Australia and clicks a state. We take that click, and return a map and imagemap of the state they clicked on. Then you click a region and keep drilling until there are no more maps.
When trying to find out what a DLL does, and what methods it has inside, us ColdFusioneers were at a bit of a loss. There is almost zero experience in this world in our team. Until we came across this very handy tool Lutz Reflector. Simply, it introspects dll files and .NET components for you, giving you information about methods and arguments. On its own this isn't the most help but can give you a leg up when you need it. Most components would come with some documentation, but even that can lack detail.
Here is the highlight blurb from the site:
Get Lutz Reflector from RedGate for free.
How to use agrep, a windows based version of the linux command line grep tool
This example comes from finding lines related to a message in smartermail log files.
Lets assume we are trying to find an email and track the actions our mail server did for that email. First I am going to filter the logs for the 16/6/2009 and return only the lines for a particular domain.
To do this we copy the days log files into a /tmp directory and run the following:
This will give us every line in all the files in the tmp directory relating to domain.com. We can then sift through this manually to find a row relating to the mail we need.
One of these lines looks like this:
Notice the [xxxxx] reference number - this is carried through all logs for this particular email, so we can use thet to find all log entries about this mail:
this outputs all the lines with [25354] in them to the out.txt file
I am bored with Vista, and the Windows 7 RC came along at about the right point in time (The annual Windows reinstall was due), so I decided to take the plunge. It's a bit of a risk for primary work machine, so I prepared everything late on Friday, pulled DVD's for software out, and an XP Pro DVD just in case! By and large it was pretty smooth, but here are the issues I did run in to:
In General, it's a pretty good experience, I like the sleeker taskbar and how it hangs together, I am only on day 2 of using it, so that may change.
Having ColdFusion run on the new Windows Server 2008 server under IIS 7 is pretty easy, however you have to have the right components installed.
Windows 2008 uses lots of routines from Vista, so installs are really easy, and in this version, instead of installing everything, and then disabling the features, 2008 simpy doesnt install them.
This is nice to see, we now get a screen that asks you to select the features you wish to use on this server. Tick the boxes for IIS and you have a website server.
To get ColdFusion running on the same machine, you need to do the following:
Restart IIS and Install ColdFusion as normal. Everything should be working just fine.
You can't beat pedigree like that! Merki creates a wireless mesh network, meaning that the more nodes you add to the network the stronger it will become. San Francisco is fast becoming a free internet zone, with Meraki and the community starting to cover residential areas with Meraki mesh networks.
They provide a number of options, the standard set up gets you a piece of hardware, that you plugin, set up, place on a map and join to an existing network if there is already one nearby. You can set up unrestricted access for your computers, iPhone, handheld device, fridge etc, and limit the speed and usage of users of the free segment.
I have been following Apple and its range of Mac Books for a couple of years now as I have been curious how they are developing and the sudden market uptake between my colleagues and peers in the development world.
If you are looking at a purchase of any Apple product then go and check out the Mac Buyers Guide on macrumours.com. In the 12 months that its been in my book marks I have been watching their predictions, with some interest as my next laptop purchase will be a Mac Book Pro.
SQL server has always had difficulty with its backup and maintenance plans in removing old backups. Until now this has been a major issue on some of our servers, each month someone has to go through the backup folder and remove the old Transaction Log and Full Backup folders.
No longer - Robocopy to the rescue! Its simple but oh so efficient. (I know there are many different ways to do this, Perl/ANT etc however this is what I have available on the server)
We dont very often do much server maintenance, especially on our centralised dev and file server boxes. Mostly we don't have time, as a small team that goes through mountains of work its not a priority.
Today I had 5 minutes (!) to actually see if there was a way to automate Disk Clean up and Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP / 2003. Lo and behold:
I have been working hard on a new site, and having put adwords up I no longer want to see my hits on the Google Analytics reports because it all just gets in the way.
Analytics gives you 2 ways of excluding traffic using the filters. The first is by IP Address, and the second is to set a cookie with a predetermined value, and filter on it.
You can use the Google Analytics regular expression generator to help you create an IP address filter. This generator can convert one IP address to a simple regular expression, or it can generate a regular expression to match a range of IP addresses.
IP Address is all very well, but what if you use a number of different machines, at home / work / airport etc? Well - setting a cookie is a good way of doing it. So far though all the tutorials I have seen suggest making a blank page, and adding some code to it to set the cookie. Why?
